As ministers lose the plot, our school is getting one of its own

Michelle Obama's vegetable garden is an inspiration to us all, says Vicki
Woods.

Michelle Obama gets her hands dirty in the White House groundsPhoto: Bloombery News

Vicki Woods

7:17PM BST 24 Apr 2009

Here in the soft, sunshiny south of England, we are contemplating our cabbages and digging for victory. The parish council has offered one of the allotments up White Hill to the village school, and all the governors had a round robin email saying it's being cleared, rotavated and prepared for the children's use. I'm thinking strawberry beds and peas would be educational, because tastiest. Cabbages – not so much.

I was deeply impressed by Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden (especially since the first pictures showed her "groundbreaking" clods of earth with the sort of light rake that you'd use to scarify the lawn. And in Jimmy Choo boots). Still, it's commendable that she is helping Americans beat the "crisis" by emulating Eleanor Roosevelt's wartime Victory Garden. Americans call it a crisis; I call it an unfathomable recession, but either way, it does feel like there's a war on.

I came late to gardening, since my mother took such masochistic pleasure in turning my rough plot of Hampshire countryside into a super-tidy suburban front garden, complete with standard roses. She was a woman who went her own way: cupressus Lawsoniana was her favourite tree because it "didn't litter". But she's been dead long enough for me to start tearing up her tidy beds and plant vegetables.

Actually, I'm not bothering with cabbages, because they're cheap enough at Wyn the Shop, so it's just potatoes, peas and scarlet runners. And rocket. It was soothing picking rocket when yesterday's paper showed a newborn baby wrinkling its tiny nose at the headline: "This baby will be 23 before we're out of this mess."

Since I shall likely be dead by then (2032? I should live so long), I am braced by the knowledge that it's only a year till the next election. It's not rage, riot or revolt that make a political party unelectable. It's ridicule.

The Conservatives were not driven out of office in 1997 by a rampaging mob: they were laughed out. John Major's legacy is all cartoons – tucked-in underpants, Chelsea strips, rumpy-pumpy. This nation likes a laugh, even a mordant one in time of trial. "You have to laugh, or you'd cry, wouldn't you?" is a very British remark.

But we don't pay politicians to make us laugh. Once the snigger factor kicks in, they're toast, and they know they are.

Labour won three national elections because Tony Blair's electoral brilliance lay in convincing the nation he was right, even when the saloon bars could see he was dead wrong. Gordon Brown was graced with a short honeymoon as our (unelected) PM on the grounds that he was right about Red Books, every child mattering and, I don't know – post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory? Whatever. Serious man. Does big thinks.

Now, you cannot take him seriously. Porn movies, bath-plugs, trough-snuffling, email smears – it's all a national joke. At our expense. I keep being sent the YouTube clip, by dozens of emailing friends, of Gordon grinning and gurning about the "MPs' expenses" hoo-hah. It is beyond armpit-prickling and squirmy.

I can't resist clicking the link each time it pops up, even though I can now chant his sticky sentences along with him as he grinds them out. You have to laugh, or you'd cry, eh?

* There's a feature in one of the weekend supplements called "What I See in My Mirror", which always makes me run to my mirror and groan. Since what I see is nothing like my byline picture, I am susceptible to occasional offers from people whose job is to make women look younger.

The latest suggestion is an eyebrow transplant. Literally, a transplant. "They harvest hair from elsewhere to thicken up sparse brow growth," my informant said. I told her two dead white mice where the eyebrows used to be would not make me look younger. Pass.